Ecologist Builds Online Database Application Using Caspio, Saving Endangered Plants

The Otay Mountain lilac is a California native plant that is continually threatened by wildfire and other man-made disruptions. It is among the more than five thousand rare plant species in the United States at risk for extinction. That’s why the Center for Plant Conservation (CPC) at San Diego Zoo Global is working toward conserving and preserving these American natural treasures through a series of research, restoration and advocacy initiatives.

To support its efforts, the CPC utilized Caspio’s low-code development platform to build a powerful web database application, providing conservationists and ecologists with vital information to revive endangered plant species in the wild. Dr. Katie Heineman, an ecologist at the CPC, led the project and built a research database to collect data on the pollinators of rare plant species.

Even with little web development experience, Dr. Heineman successfully built and deployed an online database application sophisticated enough to match the unique needs of the scientific researchers involved with the project. The Caspio-powered applications do much more than just capture data. The CPC also uses Caspio to produce interactive data visualizations and intuitive web-based reports.

Caspio’s back-end Microsoft SQL Server supports a rich array of data formats, a must-have feature to support a comprehensive information reservoir such as the CPC’s national database. Leveraging Caspio’s robust scale and large selection of dynamic capabilities such as cascading fields, the CPC increased both the quality and speed of its data collection campaigns.

The success of the CPC’s pollinator database prompted Dr. Heineman’s team to use Caspio in another project — an online database application to track the entire seed collection for San Diego Zoo Global.

By enabling the CPC to share data among its 43 member institutions and the corresponding network of plant conservationists throughout the United States, endangered American plants — and ultimately the environment — now have a more promising future.

View the case study to learn more.

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